I was going home when I saw a new store on my way. Guess what? It was a bookstore! When I saw that, one question appeared in my mind: why is my country like this?
Another thing that made me start writing this post was seeing my country’s national library, it was ridiculously big! seeing that building was like seeing a palace.
When I was younger, I remember going to a public library located in an 18th-century palace. Obviously, I didn’t go there because I liked it, but because my mother always wanted me to be like her (obsessed with books), the only book I ended up bringing home was an encyclopedia about the kings of my country. I never understood why literature was important or why everyone was obsessed with it.
Our education tells us to understand the meaning behind poems and books from the middle ages and why poet A or writer B was thinking C while writing some random boring story, also, the beggining of every textbook is book propaganda about “why is reading important”.
I told my fellow classmates that literature was boring and they all agreed with me, they are tired of learning outdated stories and they think that schools should change because we are on the 21st century where AI, smartphones, social media and computers like the one where I am writing this rules the world and not some paper with ink older than the roman empire.
And the consequences are present everyday, not only the new bookstore mentioned in the beggining or the gigantic library, for example, when the 2020 economic crisis started, a woman in an interview said that the crisis affected her because she couldnt buy two books at the same time, also, writers have influence in our society like the writer who ended up being the minister of education in 2009.
In my opinion we are only protecting this because the older generation was indoctrinated first, but I have hope that this century will be the end and that we will reach a level of technology that literature books of some dead men didnt allow us to reach.
I think my country must change for the better, we cant mantain this forever otherwise we will be less developed than everyone else, for me its unbelievable that a book of a writer who died 400 years ago about incest coexists with ChatGPT, at least in my country that is possible…
You’ve not said what country you’re in!